Record-Breaking Stats On Seniors Tournament

WSOP Event #29 opened its first day with a bang. The $1,000 buy-in Seniors No-Limit Championship broke records for single-day entries in all of poker’s history. On the 43rd annual WSOP, Event #29 attracted a total of 4,128 players.

There was never an event in the past that had attracted such number of players. Tournaments and main events in the past years never conquered such feat; not even when poker had started to pick up as a popular game all over the world during 2009 until this year.

A previous record of the largest single starting day event was at last year’s Seniors event with 3,752 players. All of those players signed up for the $1,000 buy-in event that won James Hess a good $557,435. If the Seniors tournament continues to develop its popularity among players for the next years, there would be a 5,000-player field for next year.

This year proved to be a very huge one for WSOP with Rio All-Suite Hotel opening three of its function rooms for the event. There are about 478 tables spread out across the Amazon, Brasilia and Pavilion rooms. To accommodate all these people, they also moved the start time to 10AM. So far, this year’s WSOP is also the biggest of the year with its winner Allyn Jaffrey-Shulman bagging $607,713. The prize pool at this year’s event is set at $3,715,200.

Four hundred twenty three players have been paid after the money bubble burst with the first cashout paid to Jerry Richard amounting to $1,858. With those generous amounts, it’s hard not to be impressed and hard for poker players not to want to join an event. There are seven main events in the tournament and all of these events have multiple starting days.

As for the Senior players, they find the whole tournament made older players happy to have a good time and what other way to enjoy poker more than to play it in Vegas? Johnny Hale, the unofficial spokesperson of the Senior players said that the majority of these older players did not care if they won or lost.

He added that most of these players find poker as fun. This could be because most of them, if not all, have achieved success in their lives. Sadly, the top prize for this event will only be second to Ashkan Razavi’s $781,398 win in Event #9.

This year’s WSOP also broke records in grabbing the best three-day weekend total and set it at 9,734 starters for over three events. That’s only about a few hundred more players before they break the 10,000-entry barrier.

Friday’s Seniors event attracted 4,128 players. Saturday also drew in 2,811 starters on the $1,500 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em event. This is a 22% increase from the same tournament held a week before that. Last Sunday’s $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em drew 2,795 players and was just four players short from last summer’s number of participants in the same event.

Last week, the non-gold bracelet tournaments attracted over 4,000 players in total. This included the biggest field in the history of WSOP on Sunday.